On Wednesday, Google announced a new partnership with Cisco to help customers improve agility and security in a hybrid world with a fully supported, open solution for developing and managing applications on-premises and in Google Cloud.
“Together, we’re working on a complete solution to develop, run, secure and monitor workloads, enabling customers to optimize their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid lock-in. Developers will be able to create new applications in the cloud or on-premises consistently using the same tools, runtime and production environment,” said Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners, Google Cloud.
At the heart of this architecture are open source platforms, Kubernetes and Istio. Customers will be able to accelerate on-premises app modernization using a Kubernetes-based container strategy that’s consistent with cloud-native technology. On-premises, Cisco’s hyper-converged platform, Cisco HyperFlex, will provide a cloud-ready solution for Kubernetes and containers, and management tools to enforce security and consumption policies.
“We’re working together to deliver a consistent Kubernetes environment for both on-premises Cisco Private Cloud Infrastructure and Google’s managed Kubernetes service, Google Container Engine. This way, you can write once, deploy anywhere and avoid cloud lock-in, with your choice of management, software, hypervisor and operating system. We’ll also provide a cloud service broker to connect on-premises workloads to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services for machine learning, scalable databases and data warehousing,” Boden added.
The partnership is expected to enhance existing on-premises infrastructure and extend it to the cloud addresses tough operational problems that enterprises have traditionally struggled to solve. It also takes advantage of Cisco’s best-of-breed capabilities, including the ability to extend Cisco’s network and security policies and configurations and monitor application behavior across hybrid cloud environments.